JAL said:
Everyone, I did not say that I have rejected evolution. But I have reservations and I doubt that I will have time to study all the evidence. Right now there are two obstacles to my accepting it. (1) Punctuated equilibrium seems to be a theory. I'm not sure it has been PROVEN (that is, not to the extent that other scienctific theories have been "proven").
No scientific theories have ever been proven, they are supported and provisionally accepted. PE is nothing more than a recognition of the tempo of evolution due to selection pressures and population sizes. There is a good thread in this forum that goes over the evidence for PE. If I have time, I'll look for it.
JAL said:
(2) I can't go into all my reasons, but I still detect hints of bias on the evolutionary side (although much less than most Creationists have exhibited).
Evolution has a huge bias. It is science, and as science it can only concern itself with natural explanations that can be tested.
JAL said:
As a result, I still have to look to Creationists sources for help, specifically Hugh Ross, because I don't have the intellect or the time to study all the source material when forming my opinions/reservations. He has read more of the literature.
Hugh Ross is good in that he accepts the evidence for an old universe, however, when it comes to biology he is out of his league and apparently affected by Morton's Demon like the rest of the creationists. His arguments against evolution fail as badly as a young earth creationist. I'd be happy to go into any detail on any of these arguments you'd like to bring up.
JAL said:
You will ask, then why do I bother to form an opinion at all? Because I don't believe that the Bible CLEARLY teaches evolution and consequently I'm a bit leery of it. Look at it this way. In the past, the Bible was part of the American curriculum. Today, prayer has been removed from public schools and Christian students can be reprimanded for expressing their Christianity.
Christians cannot be reprimanded for expressing their religious convictions, any school that does so is acting outside of its jurisdiction. Schools are prevented from endorsing any specific religious beliefs, due to the establishment clause.
JAL said:
You will be hard pressed to convince me that evolutionism has nothing to do with this. Just as we speak of the straw that broke the camel's back, evolutionism seems to be the straw that finally secularized our school system.
Diversity of opinion is what is causing greater enforcement of our already secular nation. When everybody in a town is of the same religious denomination, you do not get a lot of complaints. Mix in a few catholics, a jewish family and an atheist or two, and these infractions become a problem.
JAL said:
I'm not saying that evolutionism is the only factor (perhaps it was only a straw). But it SEEMS to play a significant role, so I can't help but form opinions about it even though I am uneducated about evolution.
Evolution is a scientific theory. It is not responsible for enforcing secularism any more than is the atomic theory of chemistry.
JAL said:
Now back to Hugh Ross. I like him because (A) he doesn't throw all science to the wayside and (B) he strives for a literal reading of the Bible. I don't know to what extent I can trust his conclusions, but right now I have no one else to look to. My experience with God leads me to prefer a literal reading of the Bible. Hugh Ross is the only scientist I know who has this same aspiration.
You guys show me a whole slew of supposedly transitional forms. Hugh Ross says that they are not transitional. Who am I supposed to believe?
Why accept anything on authority. Understand the science. Examine the data, read the analyses. The reason evolution is so widely accepted is not because of evil atheist scientists (most scientists are not atheists) it is because it is well supported.
JAL said:
At this point, I don't know. All I can say is that I still have reservations about evolution. Here is an article by Hugh Ross that I am currently looking at. It will take me a while to work through it. Feel free to comment on it if you like:
http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/humanevolution.shtml
Looking at this article, one particular sentence comes to mind:
With respect to human origins, evolutionary biologists have made an a priori philosophical commitment to a strictly naturalistic explanation based primarily on a neo-Darwinian evolutionary paradigm.
My problem with the sentence is that it tries to single out evolutionary science as being methodologically materialistic. The fact is
all science is methodologically materialistic. Science
has to assume natural causes because natural causes are the only thing the method can investigate. Singling out evolution leads the reader to believe that evolutionary science is somehow different from other forms of science, and therefore less reliable. This is simply not the case.
Here is another sentence in the same essay:
It is clear that evolutionary relationships proposed by paleoanthropologists are highly speculative and developed from unreliable and poorly understood data sets of limited size. In light of this, it is scientifically untenable to assert that human evolution is a fact.
This is, of course, very misleading. Yes, given just fossils it is nealry impossible to determine which fossil species lead to which other fossil species. However, that does not detract from each of these fossils being exquisite examples of transitionals, showing the gradual morphologic change from an ape-like ancestor to modern humans.
Let me explain transitional species to you. If evolution is correct then there is a single family tree for all species. If this is true, then there once existed species who were the common ancestor of closely related extant species such as humans and chimpanzees. If that is true, then there also existed species that demonstrate the emergence and development of the specific traits that separate the modern species from the proposed evolutionary ancestor. In the case of humans, this would be something very ape-like.
Due to the branching nature of evolution, and the frequent pruning of the family tree, there will likely have been many species that displayed some of these intermediate traits, and some of these likely went extinct.
Given all of this, we would expect to find some fossils that demonstrate these intermediate character traits, but it is not possible to know if the represented species were directly ancestral to the extant species (humans) or simply lived on an extinct side branch.
Not knowing the specific family tree of these fossils does not negate they are exactly the kind of creatures predicted by evolution. To be clear, here is a nice picture of some of these species arranged to show a gradual progression: